OVP: The Big Country (1958)

Film: The Big Country (1958)

Stars: Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, Bul Ives, Charles Bickford

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Burl Ives*, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Gregory Peck: click here to learn more about Mr. Peck (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked a lot about Gregory Peck's long career in westerns, and how they were a large part of his persona throughout the 1950's.  This week, we're going to end our season with another western (it is our theme for a reason-he made a lot of them), but we're going to talk in terms of Peck's career around how, after a long decade of being leading man in a variety of films, he finally gained his stature as one of the "important" actors of his generation by securing an Academy Award for Best Actor, which to this point had alluded him.  Between 1960-64, Peck appeared in a lot of very big & well-received movies, including The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, and How the West Was Won, but it was not in a western but as a small-town lawyer that Peck found his signature role.  Playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Peck got his Tom Joad, his George Bailey, his Sergeant York role that would define his career, and is usually the performance that he is name-checked with.  Decades later, Atticus would be named by the American Film Institute as the "Greatest Hero in American Film History" and would win him an Oscar in 1962 against the very stiff competition of Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.  As I've seen The Big Country many times before, we are going to focus on the Oscar win of a different actor, Burl Ives, today with our film as we finish up our month devoted to Peck.

(Spoilers Ahead) A giant, nearly three-hour western from director William Wyler, The Big Country is an adaptation of a series of Saturday Evening Post stories by novelist Donald Hamilton.  This is a big movie, so I'll try to summarize enough to keep us grounded.  To start we have James McKay (Peck), a docile sea captain who is in the West to meet his spirited fiancee Patricia (Baker), whose father the Major (Bickford) owns much of the land in the area.  His rival, and by proxy Patricia's rival, is Rufus Hannassey (Ives), with whom he has a long-standing feud that we initially read as being Rufus's fault (after all, his daughter is engaged to our leading man), but as we continue we begin to understand that this is a complicated, shades-of-grey western where Rufus is just trying to get access to a water reservoir that is owned by Julie Maragon (Simmons), a kindly schoolteacher who is best friends with Patricia.  After a standoff between the Major & Rufus at Patricia & McKay's engagement reception, things escalate, with all sides starting to show their true colors.  Patricia, not liking McKay's more gentlemanly attitude, particularly after ranch-hand Steve Leech (Heston, in a rare for this era supporting role) insults him, calls off the engagement, and the film ends with the Major & Rufus killing each other in a standoff, with McKay & Julie ending up together and riding off to their own ranch & life in the west.

I really liked The Big Country, much more than I expected for a western that rarely makes it onto the pantheon of great movie western lists.  I thought the cinematography was astounding.  The fistfight scene between Peck & Heston, shot much in the dark, is glorious, and there's a clear love of the countryside that encapsulates the best of western photography.  The movie needed a bit more focus (there's maybe one too many plotlines keeping it away from being an all-timer), but I think the strangest thing for me was how good Ives was.  Ives' win here is generally considered by most Oscar historians to be something of a proxy win for his more notable work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that year, which he'd been campaigned as lead for by MGM, but he's superb here as a man who understands the value of everything around him, and is much smarter and even mildly sympathetic compared to what you'd find for a traditional western villain of this era.  His views on honor, and the way he handles his whimpering son (loving him, but also not respecting him) is really smartly played, and adds levels to a movie that could've been paint-by-numbers.  It's a cool win, something I honestly didn't anticipate going into this movie given other reviews I've read of this picture.

Coming out of To Kill a Mockingbird, it's clear that Peck was ready to move onto a different chapter of his career, his time in Hollywood cemented by the city's highest honor.  While he'd make other movies, including roles in MacArthur and The Boys from Brazil, as well as in smaller parts in remakes of his films Cape Fear and Moby Dick, he'd never be in a movie as big as the ones from his 1940's to early 1960's heyday.  He would go on to a number of leadership roles in the industry, including as AMPAS President and Chairman of the American Film Institute.  He would become involved with politics, being a critic of the Vietnam War, and would campaign for a number of Democratic politicians, including US Senator Donald Stewart and Peck's own son Carey who ran for Congress in California in the late 1970's.  He even did voiceover work in the (successful) commercials made to stop the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.  Peck died of pneumonia in 2003 at the age of 87.

Next month, we're going to take a step back and take a look at an actress whose career started before Peck's and the one woman we're going to profile this year for Saturdays with the Stars, a performer who for a time in the 1930's & 40's would find success in the most unlikely genre imaginable given how her career started: the western.

OVP: Come and Get It (1936)

Film: Come and Get It (1936)

Stars: Edward Arnold, Joel McCrea, Frances Farmer, Walter Brennan

Director: Howard Hawks & William Wyler

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Walter Brennan*, Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Walter Brennan: click here to learn more about Mr. Brennan (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Walter Brennan spent much of his early career in bit parts, largely focusing on small roles that amount to what we would call "cameos" if he were famous, but really were extra work since he hadn't made a big name for himself yet.  It wasn't until 1935 that Brennan would start to get more significant work, but that history is important when you think about Brennan's most singular achievement to anyone looking back on his career today: that of winning three Academy Awards in the span of five years, unprecedented for an actor both then and now (it seems pretty much unthinkable that this feat will ever be matched).  This is because of a quirk in Academy voting laws in the early 1930's.  When the Academy introduced the supporting categories in 1936 (in part due to Franchot Tone being nominated for Best Actor in what pretty much everyone considered to be a "supporting" role), extras were still a part of SAG (this would end in 1946 when the Screen Extras Guild would be formed) and as a result, many were eligible to vote for the Oscars.  One of the primary reasons that people attribute to Brennan's unusual feat of winning three Oscars in rapid succession was of his popularity as a former member of the extras, who voted for him en masse to get all three of his trophies.  I have seen two of Brennan's three Oscar wins (he would later take trophies for Kentucky and The Westerner), so I figured I couldn't do a month devoted to him without getting to his first (and my final) Oscar win for him, Come and Get It.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, based on the bestselling novel by Edna Ferber is about Barney Glasgow (Arnold), a cutthroat logging tycoon who rises up from the ranks as a foreman and (thanks to a lack of scruples and marrying for money) finds himself as the head of the logging industry in Wisconsin.  The film is split into two halves, the first of which shows Barney's rise, when he & his buddy Swan Bostrom (Brennan) form a partnership, and Barney must choose between the true love of his life, a saloon singer named Lotta Morgan (Farmer) and the wealthy Emma Louise (Mary Nash).  He chooses money, and Lotta ends up marrying Swan, even though her heart is broken.  Years later, when Barney is rich, he seeks out Swan, now a widower, whose daughter Lotta Bostrom (also Farmer) is the spitting image of her mother (apparently that's what happens when you cast the same actress to play both parts!).  Driven mad by his inability to have Lotta in his youth, he aggressively pursues her, even though he's married and there's a huge age gap, but the younger Lotta is more interested in his son Richard (McCrea), and despite Barney's protestations, Richard & Lotta end up together in the final moments.

There's a lot of good stuff here, and I get why this novel was a success.  Barney is not an antihero but a proper villain, but still a bad guy who learns a lesson by the film's end-that youth & love are far more precious than money, and you cannot buy them no matter how hard you try.  The final moments of the film work really well as Lotta rejects Barney not for his money or for his cruelty, but for his age, the one thing his fortune cannot do is buy back the time he's spent selling his soul.  It's solid plotting, and combined with the cruelty of his treatment of the elder Lotta, a great comeuppance.

But in the Hays Code world, you don't really get a lot of mileage out of the obsession that Barney has with the younger Lotta (in a different world, this could've served as inspiration for Vertigo), and Arnold isn't a good enough actor to get beyond what the page has in front of him.  Instead we largely get a slog, albeit one with a very talented Frances Farmer playing two women so differently you'll be forgiven for thinking they're different actresses (Farmer, of course, is the stuff of Hollywood legend given her tragic offscreen life, but it's nice to see her afforded the ability to actually act here, and prove that she was more than just a sad tale).  Brennan's performance is, charitably, fine.  He plays Swan as a comic relief stereotype, which would be fine except there's nothing really there.  I will admit that I generally like Walter Brennan (if you watch enough old Hollywood performances inevitably you see him in a lot of stuff), but I don't know that I've ever seen a movie where he actually deserved an Oscar nomination, much less a win.  This is true for his caricature of a person in Come and Get It.

Top 10 Films of 2021 (that aren't from 2021)

All right, we are officially going to be doing two days to close 2021 today.  While we won't be bidding adieu to the year exactly (Oscar predictions are to come, and of course we'll eventually get to the 2021 OVP when Oscar gives us his nominees), but today we'll be doing my Top 10 lists of the year.  As is tradition for a blog that focuses a lot on classic movies, we're not going to start with movies from 2021's calendar year (that's tomorrow), but instead we're going to focus on movies that I saw for the first time in 2021.  As you can imagine if you've been playing along this year, our Saturdays with the Stars project (which focused principally on the filmography of Alfred Hitchcock) meant that the Master of Suspense is going to be well-represented here (I saw, for the record, 351 movies in 2021, a personal best, but Hitch was by far my most-watched director).  Weirdly, though, our series of Saturday with the Stars also resulted in a different director getting a double dip below.  I won't keep you waiting any longer-here are the (alphabetical...choosing this lot was hard enough) list of the films I saw for the first time in 2021:

The Children's Hour (1961)

dir. William Wyler

More modern than I expected, and definitely more sympathetic than I'd have guessed, The Children's Hour is a splendid achievement.  The whole cast is giving it their A-Game, though none more than Shirley MacLaine (criminally snubbed at the Oscars) for a woman who increasingly cannot tell truth from fiction.

Dead End (1937)

dir. William Wyler

Weirdly modern given its release date & studio, Dead End is a wonderful ensemble look at the day in the life of a series of jaded New York City slums, as every character faces consequences & realities that they aren't prepared for.  Best of the lot are Humphrey Bogart & Claire Trevor, the latter in just a few minutes of screen-time giving us decades of history in every urgent stare.

The Innocents (1961)

dir. Jack Clayton

Completely shocking, and genuinely terrifying (not just 1960's scary...watch this alone at your peril).  This might be the best performance I've ever seen from Deborah Kerr (leave it to Oscar to nominate her regularly for routine work & then skip when she's seismic), and the sound is of another dimension.  You won't be able to forget it.

Journey to Italy (1954)

dir. Roberto Rosellini

A deceptively simple, but persistently devastating look at a marriage on the rocks.  Sanders is perfectly cast as an insecure cynic, Bergman is mesmerizing as a woman at a crossroads, but perhaps the best part is the way that Rossellini consistently uses a war-ravaged (real world) Italy as a metaphor for their fractured union.

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

dir. Alfred Hitchcock

A genuinely compelling mystery, one that starts out as a Grand Hotel-style ensemble before giving us one of Hitchcock's funniest thrillers.  The mystery will keep you guessing, the cast never disappoints...this is perhaps Hitchcock's earliest true masterpiece.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944)

dir. Preston Sturges

Genuinely wonderful little charmer, with great (dare I say Oscar-worthy?) performances from Hutton, her sister Diana Lynn (a riot), and her father William Demarest.  Madcap (this is not an "on in the background" screwball), but totally worth it.

Moonrise (1948)

dir. Frank Borzage

Moodily lensed by cinematography legend John Russell, Moonrise is a bleak, gorgeously-shot film noir with a cascade of marvelous performances.  If you've always thought Ethel Barrymore was a bit too "stage-y" in her film roles, watch this-it'll make you a believer (here is the role she should've won that Oscar for).

Rope (1948)

dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Totally fascinating editing, completely gay-Dall & Granger are flawless together as killers (and probably lovers) with very different agendas.  Hitchcock rarely shied away from implied sex, and this movie has it in a ticking clock mystery where the cast is so good even Jimmy Stewart sometimes finds himself upstaged.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

dir. Alfred Hitchcock

One of the many undersung Hitchcock deep cuts I watched this year, Shadow of a Doubt is a nasty, delicious affair where Joseph Cotten (marvelous) ruthlessly torments & manipulates his confused niece (a never better Teresa Wright).  Everything about this movie works.

La Strada (1954)

dir. Federico Fellini

A glorious, foundational movie, one that continues to reverberate after you leave the theater, understanding the cruel ways that the film's plot doles out reality (cause ultimately that's what this movie is about, the reality of what matters and how we don't understand it until it's gone).  Masina is otherworldly as the tragic Gelsomina.

OVP: The Letter (1940)

Film: The Letter (1940)

Stars: Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson, Frieda Inescort, Gale Sondergaard

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 7 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Actress-Bette Davis, Supporting Actor-James Stephenson, Cinematography, Film Editing, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

As I work my way through all of the Oscar nominees from every year, while the films are oftentimes randomly-selected, I do end up gravitating toward movies that I suspect I'll actually like more often-than-not, and as a result some of my favorite performers I've nearly completed all of their nominated work.  Bette Davis would win 10 Oscar nominations in her career, one of the largest counts of any performer ever, and I am nearly done with the list after recently catching her in The Letter.  Bette is one of my favorite actresses-she's versatile in a way that modern performers are, fully-committing to the role (had she rose to fame in the 1950's, she would have certainly been part of the "Method School" of acting), and eschewing her glamour if need be to sink a part.  That's evident in The Letter, the remake of the 1929 film that won Jeanne Eagels a nomination for the same part that won Davis hers, where she totally inhabits the cutthroat Leslie Crosbie.

(Spoilers Ahead) Leslie Crosbie is a married woman in Malaya, who in the opening scene of the film has shot Geoff Hammand, a man we otherwise assume to be "decent" but who Leslie confesses tried to rape her (or in 1940's parlance, "make love to me") and she killed him in self-defense.  While Leslie will stand trial, everyone assumes that she's innocent, and the only person who seems to suspect her story is her attorney Howard Joyce (Stephenson), whose clerk shows him a letter that Leslie wrote to Hammond, asking him to come to see her (implying that they were having an affair).  As the film goes, it turns out that, despite Leslie's shifting story, she was having an affair with Hammond even though they are both married (he's wed to a Eurasian woman played by Sondergaard), and she killed him in a jealous rage.  In the end, Howard buys back the letter, putting his legal career in jeopardy, but it works temporarily-Leslie is acquitted due to lack of evidence.  However, as the film ends, Leslie tells her husband Robert (Marshall) that she still loves Hammond & doesn't love him, and when she enters their garden, she realizes that Mrs. Hammond is there, ready to kill her, which she does...and then is promptly arrested for the crime of enacting revenge on the woman who killed her husband.

I'd already seen the Eagels version of The Letter (you can read about it here), and liked it-Eagels is magnificent, and it's a good part.  The 1940 film is even better, but it struggles because in 1929 you could have a pre-Code ending, and you can't in 1940.  In the Eagels version, the ending is different-the Leslie character lives & gets away with the murder, but her husband keeps her in Malaysia as punishment for her sins rather than letting her return home.  She's left, therefore, in a prison of her own marriage.  It's much more effective than simply having Leslie, who has spent the entire movie crawling over barbed wire to ensure that she doesn't pay for her sins, randomly walk into her own death.  I don't know a better way to have gotten around the Hays Code without changing the court result (which would have totally ruined the plot, since the corrupted justice system is so central to the plot of the film), but the ending nearly ruins the movie, which otherwise is a triumph.

Much of that triumph comes from the two key parts in the film played by Davis & Stephenson.  Davis was born to play the role of a woman like this-she was so good at making complicated women genuinely complicated, rather than having them wither under the male gaze.  She plays her as someone who knows her privilege, who knows her status as a woman-of-good-background, and knows how to wield that power to maximum effect.  The makeup department helps (the heavy smoky eye look just accentuates that "she's got Bette Davis eyes"), but Davis brings a fire to this role, a woman who wants to roll the dice as long as she can to see if she's caught.  Stephenson is equally good as the lawyer drawn into her lair.  Oftentimes with this part he'd be played for a sap, but he goes in willingly, though perhaps not with the same level of knowledge of how bad Leslie is for him until it's too late.  Both were richly deserved Oscar nominations.  The only real weak link in the cast is Sondergaard, who has virtually no words and is heavily into yellowface dramatics that, are, well, pretty racist (you'd be fine fast-forwarding through most of her scenes).

The remaining nominations are all good, though not all equal.  The score is fine-it's a heavy, dramatic score, but it doesn't standout in the way you'd expect a film like this to (this is not Now, Voyager).  The direction is taut & layered, as is the cinematography (so focused on Davis unmoved face, it captures the spirit of her character without her even needing to say a word).  The editing is also strong, though again the Sondergaard sequences needed to be trimmed or played for less dramatics (even in 1940, when the treatment of Sondergaard's character might have been commonplace, it should have been obvious that this was hitting a melodrama that the rest of the film didn't meld with).  I will say, again, that had this been a year where Makeup was a category at the Oscars (that didn't become a competitive field until the early 1980's), I would have cited it, as Davis has never looked better & I think this is one of those moments where the increasingly dramatic makeup (showing her guilt with a heavy mascara pen) is crucial to the character herself.

OVP: Dead End (1937)

Film: Dead End (1937)

Stars: Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Humphrey Bogart, Wendy Barrie, Claire Trevor, Marjorie Main

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Supporting Actress-Claire Trevor, Cinematography, Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Sylvia Sidney-click here to learn more about Ms. Sidney (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to conclude our month-long tribute to Sylvia Sidney not far from where we started.  In some ways I might have cheated you out of a bit of Sidney's career by focusing so closely on a tight range of films.  Sidney's career did continue past the 1930's, but it was never the same as her brief heyday.  The actress worked sparingly into the 1940's, eventually being declared "box office poison" and only getting work in television.  While she would have two major comebacks in her career, first in an Oscar-nominated turn for 1973's Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (based on the reaction at the time, she was not expecting Tatum O'Neal to win & wasn't happy about it) and then as a bit player in the Tim Burton films Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks! (Burton was a longtime fan)...I just didn't feel like these really captured the theme of our series this year or of Sidney's career as an actual headliner, so we're going to finish up our month with one of the more consequential films in her career, and certainly the better-remembered: 1937's Dead End.

(Spoilers Ahead) Dead End is unusual in the way it tells its multiple stories, so I'll give you a summary of kind of where the plot is, and then try to wrap your head around the structure.  The movie takes place in the New York City slums, where wealthy residents live in locked-up apartment penthouses while below them the poor inhabit run-down tenements.  The film has at its center a group of young teenagers who engage in petty crime, but most of the actual plot of Dead End is around a series of different adults.  Principally, there's Drina (Sidney), whose younger brother is one of the gang but who hopes that she'll be taken out of the slums by a rich man who never materializes.  Her childhood friend Dave (McCrea) is having an affair with Kay (Barrie) whom he loves but who cannot provide for her in the way that the wealthy man she's having an affair with can.  Concurrently, we see Baby Face Martin (Bogart) who comes back to his old neighborhood, seeing Dave (who he knew once) and wanting to meet up with his old girlfriend Francey (Trevor).  Baby Face, though, isn't welcome here-his mother (Main) won't welcome him home, and once he meets Francey he realizes that she's now a prostitute, one who is dying of syphilis.  Baby Face & Dave get into an altercation while Baby Face is plotting his next crime (kidnapping the son of one of the wealthy penthouse owners), and in the process Baby Face dies, and Dave gets the reward money.  Despite Kay offering to run away with Dave now that he has the money, he chooses instead to help Drina, whom he has always loved, pay for her brother to stay out of a juvenile detention facility, and hopefully stopping the poverty-to-crime cycle.

Dead End feels like a screened play, which it was (the original was by Sidney Kingsley, and was adapted here by Lillian Hellman).  The teenage hoodlums feel interchangeable (a bit of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern), but there's a fascinating dynamic in their language & their attitude.  For a movie made in 1937, it feels refreshingly modern, and I think that's that it's capturing some of the youth of the era in a way that we don't see for films often, and largely wouldn't afterwards because these youths would end up just a few years later going to war.  Though the cast would change, these kids would star in a series of films for Samuel Goldwyn,that would eventually become the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and finally the Bowery Boys, a series that would stretch two decades.  I haven't seen any of these movies, and none of them enjoy the critical reputation of Dead End, but I get why Goldwyn wanted to repeat this recipe.  The youths commentating on their adult counterparts, sometimes not knowing exactly why the adults are motivated to do the foolish things they do (thus getting around some of the post-Code conversations about sex, violence, & the criminal justice system) is smart-it works really well.

This is just one of the aspects of Dead End that's a winner.  Our star is Sylvia Sidney, and she gets her due (and yet another series of moments where she can appear flummoxed against impossible odds, which kind of became her theme this month), but she's not the reason you leave this film impressed.  That would be Humphrey Bogart & Claire Trevor.  Bogart wasn't yet a proper star when this came out (hence his third billing), but he proves why he became one with a rough, merciless performance.  He is cruel, and plays his role well as an adult man who never got beyond a teenager's mentality of "me, me, me"...you see that in the way that he admonishes his mother for not loving him unconditionally, even though he's a murderer.  And you see that in the big scene he has with Claire Trevor about halfway through the movie.

Trevor plays a prostitute named Francey, one who was once the love of Baby Face's life, and whom he sees as the ideal woman.  But in the years he's been away with his criminal enterprise, she has become a prostitute, and is dying.  This is one of the shortest performances ever nominated for an Oscar-it's just one scene-but it's unbelievably good.  Trevor comes in with bravado, plays Francey just right enough that you can't quite tell what is acting & what is real, and gives us a woman who gave up a hope a long time ago, but shows it's fun to dream, if only for a second.  This is brilliant acting, similar in scope to what we'd expect from 1950's method performers, and she never mines for easy sympathy.  She gets it though with Bogart playing his childish disgust (rather than understanding) when she isn't the same woman he left behind.  In under five minutes she gives us the whole story of a woman's life, and the cruelty of her unfair impending death.

The film's final two Oscar nominations are also winners.  The Art Direction is great-the street scenes feel confined, and like they're always being looked down upon from above, so that the players know where they rank in the world.  For a film from the 1930's, everything feels like it's been lived in.  And the cinematography from Gregg Toland is beautiful & electric, using closeups (like on Trevor's pale face or Sidney's tear-stained eyes) & wide shots (the shadowy looks at the docks, or how it grabs all of the production details in the scenes where the kids are hanging on a street corner) to further tell a story.  Dead End is a masterpiece, a movie that you can't really expect-it feels fresh, modern, & is a fitting end to our month devoted to its star, Sylvia Sidney.

The Living Stars of the Great Directors

Barbara Harris with Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Family Plot

In a month with a lot of obituaries on this blog (here and here), it's worth noting an actor I didn't have time to acknowledge yet, Ms. Barbara Harris.  Harris, a longtime fixture of the New York theater scene, had a brief but glorious tenure as a film star in the 1970's, starring in the original Freaky Friday, getting an Oscar nomination for Who is Harry Kellerman and Why is He Saying Such Terrible Things About Me?, and earning an Oscar nomination even if she didn't receive one for her performance as Albuquerque in Nashville.  Her passing also means that we have one less actor who has been the lead in an Alfred Hitchcock picture still alive.  Harris starred in the Master of Suspense's final film, Family Plot, and was one of ten living figures who have headlined a Hitchcock film; we profiled all 10 of these people in one of my favorite articles of last year.

This got me to thinking, however, how many actors of other Golden Age directors were still with us, and so I set out to challenge myself to look through some of the bigger Hollywood directors of the 1950's and 60's (many of whom would have been considered Hitchcock's peers) to see how many of them still have leading actors and actresses, and found that Hitch, all-things-considered, is doing rather well in terms of longevity even with just nine.  Perhaps because he had a famous penchant for hiring young women early in their careers (Shirley MacLaine and Tippi Hedren getting their first leading roles from the director), Hitch actually has more living leading players than any of the five directors I'm going to take a look at today.  For this article, I'm profiling the leading players of five noted Oscar-winning directors: John Ford, David Lean, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, and William Wyler.

(A Quick Note: I will state that when doing these write-ups, "leading" players was a loose term in some cases.  I tried to stick to strictly above-the-line players, but I'll accept quibbles in the comments if there are some actors who might have been the "leads" but weren't famous enough to get top billing at the time).

John Ford with Carroll Baker on the set of
How the West Was Won

John Ford (1894-1973)

Oscar History: Ford would become the most-honored director in the history of the Oscars, winning four Academy Awards for his work in The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Quiet Man.  In fact, the only time he lost the category was for 1939's Stagecoach (no one was getting bested by Gone with the Wind that year).

Final Film: In addition to making narrative pictures, Ford frequently worked on documentaries, so technically his final movie as a director was Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend (about Marine Corps General Chesty Puller), but his final narrative feature was 7 Women in 1966.

Survivors of His Pictures: Ford frequently worked with the same actors in his pictures, and many of them were from his heyday of the 1940's and 50's (look at how long he worked with the likes of Maureen O'Hara or John Wayne).  As a result, he's tied for the least represented director on this list, but he still has four figures that are still with us.  Among them are Sue Lyon (aged 72, from Ford's 7 Women), Carroll Baker (87, from both Cheyenne Autumn and How the West Was Won), Shirley Jones (84, Two Rode Together) and Dianne Foster (89, Gideon's Day).  These four actresses were relatively well-known in their days, but aside from Jones (who gained most of her modern fame from her work in musicals such as Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The Music Man, as well as her tenure on The Partridge Family, though she was also an Oscar-winner for Elmer Gantry), none of them are what you'd consider household names today; Jones is also the only one of the four that is still acting.  However, I think that TCM or AMPAS or AFI should get these four women on a stage to discuss Ford for posterity before it's too late for us to ask questions about working with such a major director (not to be morbid, but I think this should be true for all of these groups, in my opinion).

Julie Christie with David Lean

David Lean (1908-1991)

Oscar History: David Lean won two Academy Awards in his long career, both for Best Director (The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia).  He was also cited for Best Director for Brief Encounter, Great Expectations, Summertime, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India, losing in all of those contests, and was nominated for writing and editing at points in his career as well.

Final Film: Lean went out with a bang for his final film (the only director on this list to do so), picking 1984's critically-acclaimed A Passage to India as his swan song, coming back after a fourteen-year hiatus following the critically-panned Ryan's Daughter.

Survivors of His Pictures: Like Ford, David Lean worked frequently with the same players in his pictures (actors such as Alec Guinness and Ann Todd were in multiple Lean pictures), so there aren't as many figures to choose from when highlighting the living leads of Lean's filmography.  That being said, there are once again four figures still alive from Lean's pictures: from A Passage to India both Judy Davis (aged 63) and James Fox (79), Ryan's Daughter's Sarah Miles (76), and Doctor Zhivago's Julie Christie (78).  Sarah Miles is the only one of these figures that is officially retired, though Julie Christie is always threatening to do so.  Judy Davis is surely the most active of the bunch, however, having recently been nominated for an Emmy for her work as Hedda Hopper on Feud.

Billy Wilder with Kim Novak on Kiss Me, Stupid

Billy Wilder (1906-2002)

Oscar History: Billy Wilder's career with Oscar was far more celebrated as a writer than as a director.  While he won for helming a picture twice (The Lost Weekend and The Apartment), he was often-cited for writing, getting trophies for both of those two films as well as Sunset Boulevard.  All told he was nominated 21 times for the Oscars, including eight citations for directing (in addition to his two wins, he was also picked for Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17, Sabrina, Witness for the Prosecution, and Some Like It Hot).

Final Film: Wilder's final picture was 1981's Buddy Buddy, starring his longtime friends and co-collaborators Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, a film that was reviled by critics (Roger Ebert, in particular, found it an abomination).  Wilder notably disliked the picture, and despite living another two decades, never sat in the director's chair again.

Survivors of His Pictures: Despite working with similar collaborators in the vein of Lean and Ford, Wilder has a bit more luck when it comes to his leading actors, with six of them still with us today.  They include Fedora's Marthe Keller (aged 73), Avanti's Juliet Mills (76), Kiss Me, Stupid's Kim Novak (85), One Two Three's Pamela Tiffin (75), Ace in the Hole's Kirk Douglas (101), and 84-year-old Shirley MacLaine, who starred in Wilder's The Apartment and Irma la Douce, winning Oscar nominations for both of them.  Novak and Tiffin have been retired for a while, and while Kirk Douglas frequently makes appearances still, he hasn't acted professionally in ten years, so really it is Keller, Mills, and MacLaine who you can still see working from Wilder's era.

Elia Kazan with Kirk Douglas 

Elia Kazan (1909-2003)

Oscar History: Kazan won two Best Director trophies (for Gentleman's Agreement and On the Waterfront), while losing three of them (A Streetcar Named Desire, East of Eden, and America, America).  Kazan was also cited for producing and writing in his career, and won a controversial Honorary Oscar in 1998.

Final Film: Like Wilder, Kazan retired from making films decades before his death after a major flop.  Despite having major stars at the time, The Last Tycoon was a critical and (in particular) financial flop that caused Kazan not to make another picture for the final 27 years of his life.

Survivors of His Pictures: Here we have a more robust list of actors that almost approaches the list of survivors of Hitch's films at this point.  Among the final living stars of Kazan's films are Man on a Tightrope's Terry Moore (aged 89), On the Waterfront's Eva Marie Saint (94), Baby Doll's Carroll Baker (87), Splendor in the Grass's Warren Beatty (81), America, America's Stathis Giallelis (77), The Arrangement's Kirk Douglas (101) and Faye Dunaway (77), and The Last Tycoon's Robert de Niro (75).  It's worth noting that Baker and Saint both got Oscar nominations for their work with Kazan (Saint won the trophy), and that most of these people are still working (save Douglas and Baker).  De Niro presented Kazan with his Honorary Oscar in 1998, while Beatty was among the actors who stood and applauded (other actors such as Nick Nolte, Ed Harris, and Amy Madigan famously refused to stand or clap due to Kazan's involvement as a friendly witness during HUAC).

(From Left) Audrey Hepburn, William Wyler, and Shirley MacLaine
on the set of The Children's Hour

William Wyler (1902-1981)

Oscar History: Few directors come close to William Wyler's tenure with the Academy, as he is the only person in history to direct three Best Picture winners: Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives, and Ben-Hur.  In addition to these wins he'd gain another nine nominations for Best Director for a total of twelve (still a record): Dodsworth, Wuthering Heights, The Letter, The Little Foxes, The Heiress, Detective Story, Roman Holiday, Friendly Persuasion, and The Collector, as well as three citations for producing.  He'd take the Thalberg in 1965.

Final Film: I had always thought his final film was Funny Girl, but in the course of researching this article realized it was The Liberation of LB Jones, a drama from 1970 with an all-star cast.  Has anyone seen this-is it any good, cause I might check it out?

Survivors of His Pictures: Wyler, like Kazan, has eight living stars from his films, with two coming from his final picture: Lola Falana (aged 75) and Anthony Zerbe (82).  The other six are Funny Girl's Barbra Streisand (76), The Collector's Terence Stamp (80) & Samantha Eggar (79), The Children's Hour's Shirley MacLaine (at age 84, she's the only living person to have worked with William Wyler, Alfred Hitchcock, AND Billy Wilder), Detective Story's Kirk Douglas (101, as a result the only living person to work with Wyler, Kazan, and Wilder)) and The Heiress's Olivia de Havilland (102).  Wyler, famously an actor's director who was very good at getting Oscar nominations for his performers, directed both Streisand and de Havilland to trophies among these nominees, and Eggar was nominated for her work.  Streisand, Stamp, MacLaine, and Zerbe are all still working of this bunch (the rest have retired, and in Falana's case, has had an extremely interesting series of career turns since her work with Wyler).

There you have it-five famous directors and the actors who still remain from their work.  In the comments, let me know if there are other directors you'd like me to feature in a sequel to this column.

OVP: Ben-Hur (1959)

Film: Ben-Hur (1959)
Stars: Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, Haya Harareet, Stephen Boyd, Hugh Griffith, Martha Scott, Cathy O'Donnell
Director: William Wyler
Oscar History: Boy howdy, there's a lot-12 nominations/11 wins (the record for most wins, in a tie with Titanic and The Return of the King) (Picture*, Director*, Actor-Charlton Heston*, Supporting Actor-Stephen Boyd*, Art Direction*, Cinematography*, Special/Visual Effects*, Film Editing*, Sound*, Original Score*, Costume*, Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Perhaps no film has more staying power than the epic.  Comedies, dramas, horror films, action adventures-they've all got their own "best in shows" that are celebrated on the lists of the greatest films ever made, but it is the epic that shows up with the most regularity-Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Lord of the Rings, Titanic-films that tower over their competitors and are "must views" on nearly every collection of films to see before you die.

The problem is, though, that you only get to see these films for the first time once, and I've been trying to savor them, as I have a confession to make-I love epic films.  Yes, I know the pitfalls (they're oftentimes poorer in the acting and writing departments), but I don't care.  I find the big, expansive ideas and images that they bring to mind exhilarating, and every time I hear tell of a new epic, I want to dive in headfirst.  But with me continuing my Oscar Viewing Project, I will have to finally cross the final few that I haven't seen off my list, and today was probably the biggest remaining: Ben-Hur.

I'll admit off-the-bat that I actually knew very little of Ben-Hur, and I'm not ashamed to admit (okay, I'm a little ashamed to admit), that I didn't know if Ben-Hur was a real biblical figure or not.  Turns out he isn't, though there is a Ben-Hur mentioned in 1 Kings.  Even so, the Bible is very present in the film, and a cursory knowledge of the New Testament helps quite a bit.  Ben-Hur, instead, was a creation of Lew Wallace about a Jewish prince who existed at the same time as Jesus.  Judah Ben-Hur (his full name), is played by Charlton Heston, he of the many biblical epics and the strong profile.

If you're wondering why I keep introducing the topic without making the leap into actually, you know, discussing the film, it's because this is a nearly 4-hour movie, and one of the very few essential movies I have never seen, and part of me cannot believe I've finally encountered the movie and that part of me wants to savor it.  As you can see in the tags, this is also an American Film Institute-cited film-one of the Top 100 films in both their original and tenth anniversary list.  I have all but seven now left from that first list, and Ben-Hur was one of my final remaining films to be featured on both.  While I still have some indisputable classics (The Birth of a Nation, Spartacus, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, MASH) left, Ben-Hur was probably the one I was most looking forward to, and I shall miss having it be my answer to "what classic film have you never seen?"

But it's time to dive in, and I think the best place to begin would be the ambition behind William Wyler's storyline.  By the time you've finished, it feels like you've watched four films in one, but in the best way possible.  The movie starts with the introduction of Heston's Ben-Hur and Boyd's Messala, sibling friends and rivals (and probably lovers-I totally got what Gore Vidal was getting at in The Celluloid Closet), then moving to Ben-Hur's unjust banishment as a slave, shifting into his role as a master chariot racer, and finally into his quest to find his mother and sister, and in the process, witness the Crucifixion.  Wyler gives each of these expansive chapters their due, and you don't feel like any get short-shifted.  Some reviewers have commented that they dragged a bit too long, but I didn't feel it.  The repetitive nature of the rowing I found exhausting in a real sense, and the lengthened chariot races made me practically feel the sun in the Roman stadiums beating down on me as I watched and cheered and winced.

This confidence in the viewer's patience is perhaps the film's biggest strength.  There's a lot of big ideas to push forward in this movie-love, country, friendship, honor, religion-and they need time to simmer.  Additionally, William Wyler has created expansive and yet meticulous sets to share with the audience, and you need time for your eyes to feast.  The film won eleven Oscars, but perhaps none so appropriately than the Art Direction Oscar (I know we're not supposed to call it that anymore, but it'll take a few years for me to make the concession).  While Oscar occasionally goes with the film with the art direction that bursts from the seams (see The Grinch) rather than the set that best carries the story, here we find a case where both seem to be true.  The stadiums and Roman houses seem lived in, and if you take the time to stare you see rows of sabers, vases, and furniture all of a similar color palette. Along with the handsome costume design, you feel as if you're watching a moving, breathing Titian fresco, come to life in 65 mm.

The film also doesn't shy away from religion, and in each of those four parts Jesus plays an important role.  While the audience never gets a proper look at the actor playing Christ (you do see his face briefly in the final quarter of the film), his presence is felt first in the Christmas story (which opens the film), then when Ben-Hur, captive in the desert, receives water from Christ (a soaring moment in the score and a stunner visually in the film), the appearance and role of Pontius Pilate in the chariot races, and finally, the full Crucifixion in the final scenes.  It's a fascinating concept having a biblical epic in the time of Christ that doesn't focus on the Christ figure, but instead on a figure that in the confines of the film, is probably just as well-known.  It brings to mind that not all people focus on the same things in the public eye, and also begs the point of what may seem significant now may not be 100 years from now.  I have to say that the Jesus-on-the-edge concept really worked for me, and I was glad that Wyler smartly didn't give us a true conversation between Ben-Hur and Christ in the film, which would have shifted the focus too much toward their cursory relationship.

There's more to the film, though, than just religion, and that begins with the love/hate relationship between Heston's Ben-Hur and Boyd's Messala.  Like I mentioned above, Gore Vidal wrote them as if they had been lovers as teenagers, and though I read this tidbit after watching the film, I felt it throughout, even though it was obviously never mentioned.  Messala looks at Ben-Hur with a deep longing, and Boyd knows just how to strike the balance between his adoration for his old friend and his hatred that their relationship will never be exactly what he hopes it to be.  This conflict is the most interesting part of the first quarter (the slowest act of the film).

I can't discuss Ben-Hur without getting into the spectacular and revolutionary special effects on display in the film, particularly in the naval battle and the chariot race.  The naval battle, one I didn't know much about going into the film, is dazzling, with that excellent camera shot of the ship headed toward Ben-Hur's ship through a porthole, ready to ram into the ship and sink it into the sea.  The chariot race, which you've seen clips of even if you've never seen this entire film, is still a wonder.  The stuntmen in the movie deserved some sort of Oscar for their life-endangering work (as did the horses), and as a viewer you're struck by the immensity of what you're seeing on-screen.  So much of these scenes would be CGI today, which let's face it, takes away dramatically from the spectacle onscreen.  You can tell that there are real men, real animals, chasing around a truly constructed Roman stadium, and that's part of the invigoration.  Every turn of the carts, every crash, brings you further into the scene.  It's one of the most stunning things I've ever seen in a movie, and deserves every accolade that's been showered upon it.

I could go on, and on, and on, but I feel I need to stop this review at some point, but not before I grade the Oscar nominations.  As I mentioned above, the art direction, cinematography, sound, editing, costumes, special effects and score are all top notch, and though I have yet to see all of the other nominees, this movie's going to be tough to beat.  That's true of the top prizes, as well-William Wyler's direction and scope is something I'd have to pick over even the non-stop laugh riot that is Some Like It Hot.  It would probably have trouble taking out Some Like It Hot or perhaps North by Northwest in Best Picture, but lucky for Wyler and unlucky for the Academy's integrity, neither of those films made it into the Best Picture race, and it's tough to see Anatomy of a Murder or The Nun's Story (both films I have left to see) taking out this stunner of an epic.

That gives the film a probable nine trophies within the OVP, and I think that's where it's going to end.  Had the film had a few more of Vidal's touches, it may have leant a bit more to the dialogue and been a contender against Wilder's cross-dressing mob comedy, but Ben-Hur was a team effort, and some of the later dialogue gets a bit bogged down by heavy-handedness.  Amongst the actors, Boyd gives the best performance in the film-a cautious, angry man who gets a full character arch despite being absent for half of the film.  I would need to consult Inside Oscar, but I'm assuming that his non-mention was a large and unexpected snub, considering that he had just won the Golden Globe and couldn't even muster a nomination with the Academy.  Oscar instead chose the racially insensitive performance given by a bumbling Hugh Griffith to win the Oscar instead, and I am not impressed.

Heston's performance also gets quite hammy throughout the film.  Shirley Knight probably said it correctly when she quipped, "Hollywood is where they give Academy Awards to Charlton Heston for acting."  Heston certainly isn't bad, and does what he's called to do in the film, but he goes over-the-top quite frequently (especially during pious tirades) and is a terrible onscreen crier.  One secretly wishes that someone like Brando or Kirk Douglas had decided to take this role instead.  Either way, Heston isn't better than the ease Jack Lemmon brings to his nominated work in Some Like It Hot, or the sexy swagger that Laurence Harvey struts with in Room at the Top.


And now, twelve paragraphs later, I turn it over to you.  What are your thoughts on Ben-Hur?  How many Oscars do you think it should have taken home?  Would you make any casting changes, or leave everything as is?  And what great classic film are you still holding out on in your personal viewing?

William Wyler: A Director of Few Words

I've been thoroughly been enjoying the many entries in the William Wyler blog-a-thon that Goatdog has so graciously put together, so I thought that I would add my two cents on one of Hollywood's most accomplished auteurs.
To think of William Wyler, one will inevitably think of actors, and the myriad of performers he has left his brand upon. Picking one of them seemed a Herculean task-how does one pick between the star-is-born (both on-and-off-screen) antics of Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, the crushed naivety of Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress, the mannered perfection of Greer Garson’s Mrs. Miniver, Audrey’s joyous vacation in Roman Holiday or the wounded veterans of The Best Years of Our Lives? I couldn’t possibly pick between the bunch, but one thing struck me about each of these films when I first thought about them. The wordless, haunting and effective scenes that first came to mind when I thought about the movies; Wyler, more than hardly any other mainstream director, knew the power and effectiveness of a quiet moment.
Recall, perhaps The Best Years of Our Lives. Is there anything in Myrna Loy or Fredric March’s performances that is as telling as those haunting glances they give each other showing a sense of lost intimacy and fear that it has forever been lost in a blood-washed field across the ocean? Or perhaps Cathy O’Donnell’s mingled looks of compete adoration and desperation as she undresses the love of her life?
Best Years may in fact be Wyler’s most emotional film (I mean that as a high compliment), but each of his films have that moment where the heart soars or crumbles or thumps, and each of these scenes are largely wordless. Olivia de Havilland’s horrifying ascent up the stairs (and obvious descent into a black depression she will never retreat from) is all about her determined, moon pie eyes and strong lower lip. Greer Garson’s steely face as she’s being robbed is a harried, steely pierce that shows the audience that she’ll be able to survive anything, even as she’s being held captive.
Wyler’s characters also tell their heartbreak with little more than a curt sentence or fake smile. Streisand’s stone-faced gazes at her Nicky show that she knows that she’ll never be this happy again, and it could so easily slip away. Laurence Olivier captures the eternally hungry character of Wuthering Heights, exhibiting his complete misguided devotion to Catherine with hardly a word, but more a vengeful array of huffs and darting eyes.
To conclude this laundry list of moments, I should probably present my favorite, that being the final scene of Roman Holiday. Wyler’s script is largely relegated to anonymous members of the press corps, coming to grab a last moment with Princess Audrey before she leaves behind Rome, and yet Wyler spends most of his camera time balancing between the delicate beauty of Audrey Hepburn and the chiseled beauty of Gregory Peck. Hepburn’s face shifts only slightly through the scene, and yet the audience is able to experience a gamut of her emotions, ranging from confusion at first to betrayal to adoration and finally true heartbreak. As Audrey Hepburn turns around and gives her one true love a gaze, her heart broken, all that she can do is smile a wide grin, covering up the internal tears. A less capable director would have shown the beginnings of tears, but Wyler doesn’t saturate the scene, instead letting it simmer. He’s already hit every emotional button, now all that is left is to fade to black. It’s a near flawless moment from a director who more than once flirted with silent perfection.